In the weeks leading up to any-gift-giving occasion, he would haunt me with questions trying to guess what he'd gotten. He was always eager for me to open presents early even though I preferred to wait and be surprised. We settled the disagreement on Christmas by giving each other several smaller gifts each day in the week leading up to the holiday.
For the first two years of our marriage we flew home from Georgia to spend a week in December with our families. We weren't able to establish our own holiday tradition and felt torn between who to spend time with. No one was ever happy at the end of the week and someone would always feel that we hadn't spent enough time with them. After two years of stress and chaos, we wanted to make our first Christmas together in Massachusetts special. We planned to spend the morning together alone before going to our families' houses.
He worked the over-night shift on Christmas Eve and got home at 5:30 in the morning. He slammed his way into the house and came to wake me up like an excited child. He insisted that we open gifts before he went to sleep. For three months I had worked two jobs and twelve hour days, not counting the prep work and papers I took home nights and weekends, and was grateful to have a week to sleep in before dragging myself to the car dealership where I worked in the afternoon. I argued with him that we could wait to open gifts, but he persisted, shaking me and begging, "Come on," until I rolled out of bed and into the living room.
My eyes were barely open as I pulled the paper off the presents and watched him open his gifts. We went to sleep as soon as we were finished and when I woke up a few hours later I couldn't recall what he had given me.
The magnet pictured above was one of the smaller presents he gave to me that year in the week leading up to December 25th. When I unwrapped the paper, saw the picture of the over-flowing laundry basket, and read the lines beneath: "Women, because this shit ain't folding itself," I threw myself backward from a seated position to the floor and laughed loud and long. I placed it on the side of the fridge by the kitchen sink where I stood to wash and dry dishes after cooking dinner every night.
After a year of working two jobs and coming home to a sink full of dirty dishes, crumbs and food left out on the kitchen table, piles of clothes strewn across the kitchen and bedroom floors, and beer bottles left in every room of the house, the magnet no longer seemed funny. I started to confront him about his habits that first year because I was growing weary of cleaning up after him and didn't know how much longer I could sustain it. I started working one job and he switched to working days, but the mess he left behind only got worse. He'd go to the gym every day after work and leave his soaking wet clothes all over the floor when he got home. They'd collect for weeks before he'd take them to the basement to wash and dry them. His clean clothes never made it out of the hamper unless I found and folded them.
One night, after teaching high school all morning and attending an afternoon meeting, I stopped home for dinner before having to be back at the school from 6-8 for parent-teacher night. I came in to find dirty dishes cluttering the sink, crumbs on the counter, cabinet doors left wide open, a pile of dirty clothes on the kitchen floor in front of the coffee pot, and a toilet that he'd left unflushed. I spent most of the half-hour I had cleaning up his mess, then barely had time to shove down some salad greens before driving back to work. As I ran the dishes in the sink under water and piled them in the drying rack I glanced over at the magnet and sighed. I felt as dirty and discarded as the sweat-soaked jock strap lying in the middle of the kitchen floor.
When he'd come home from the gym at 9:30 at night I'd quietly tell him how worn down I was and how much I'd appreciate it if he could clean up after himself. Even putting clothes in the hamper would make a big difference, I said. Inevitably, this conversation that I repeated often in the last three years that we lived together would lead to an argument. He'd always say something about how he didn't have his own space even though his things took up the entire front room of our apartment, two large cabinets, and a giant walk-in closet. The thing he said most often was "You married me this way," as if my knowing he kept his bedroom a mess as a teenager made it acceptable for him to refuse to help out around the house as a married man.
I am not the same person I was when I first opened the magnet and threw my feet in the air like a laughing child. I no longer think that cooking dinner, doing laundry, and cleaning the house is the key to maintaining a happy marriage. I've realized that I don't need someone by my side to have a good time; in fact, I am most myself when I am among people who don't know me. It's alone in a crowd of strangers that I can wear my hair wild, dance like I know what I'm doing, and sing as if my voice sounds strong and melodic. I am learning to embrace the joy of accepting things as they are and not as I'd hoped they would be.
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